talk to your auntie tomorrow, just to make sure,” Mrs. Rexford said. “But don’t worry. It’ll be all right.”
“Will she be mad?” At the thought of her aunt’s gentle face, Sarah almost began to cry again.
“To tell you the truth,” her mother said, “I think she’d like her girls to know who their real grandma is.” There was a knowing quality in her voice that made Sarah realize that the sisters, for all their differences, shared some deep, unspoken rapport.
“Slipups happen to the best of us,” Mrs. Rexford continued. “Your auntie learned about her situation when she was about Momoko’s age.”
“Oh no…”
“She heard a rumor at school and came to me to ask if it was true. She was quiet, kind of shaken. She seemed so alone. I sat her down and told her that our mother never wanted to give her away, that she’d always regretted it. I think it helped. I hope it helped.”
They sat quietly. The dusk had deepened, and the standing Buddha was now a flat, dark silhouette.
“Did she talk to Granny?”
“No. We kept that conversation a secret from the adults. To this very day, neither your grandma nor Granny has any idea she found out early.”
Sarah lifted her face to look at her mother. Their eyes met in relief that they had been spared such a fate.
Never again was Sarah fully at ease around the Asaki household.
She was ashamed to meet her aunt Masako’s eyes. And in Momoko she no longer saw a simple child, but an additional complication in the forward-thinking game. Now, if her grandmother bought her a new dress or a trinket, Sarah hid it from her cousins. She constantly searched Momoko’s eyes, alert for any signs of jealousy.
If she could be so angry after just one look from Mrs. Asaki, then how could it not be different for her aunt and cousin? What resentments did they feel that they could not express?
Thus it came about that Sarah drew away from the Asaki house, choosing to adopt the social boundaries of her elders. As the years passed, the distance between the girls would grow to resemble that of the generation before them.
chapter 15
In the parlor, next to the tokonoma alcove, a narrow storage recess ran horizontally along the wall. It had miniature sliding doors made of the same durable paper as the fusuma room dividers. This space had been designed to store seasonal hanging scrolls, but the Kobayashis used it for their photograph albums.
Five years ago Sarah had preferred the newer vinyl albums, filled with pictures of herself as a baby and a toddler. But ever since the talk about black-market rice and snakes and adoptions, she had become curious about the older albums at the back of the shelf. Those books were of better quality, covered with aged fabric that had faded to shades of brown and indigo. Their silk tassels, now rust colored, still had centers of bright purple.
Today she was leafing hurriedly through the “war and occupation” album. There weren’t many pictures from that period, barely enough to fill up the book. The photographs were tiny. Some were the size of playing cards and others even smaller, glued onto the black cardboard pages like stamps in a collection.
She was looking for a specific photograph, and here it was: the only picture of Mr. Kobayashi’s former wife. It had been taken in their garden in Manchuria, a year before she contracted typhoid fever and died. She had a round, blank face and rosebud lips, exactly like a kokeshi doll, and she was so petite she made young Mr. Kobayashi look tall in contrast. The baby boy bundled in her arms would also contract the fever, but survive. After the war, Mr. Kobayashi would bring his sickly baby back to Japan and marry Sarah’s widowed grandmother. This baby was Sarah’s uncle Teinosuke.
She was looking for this picture because her uncle was coming for lunch today, and she had overheard her grandmother saying in wry tones that Teinosuke took after his mother. To the girl’s disappointment, the face on the page revealed no new clues to the woman’s personality. She scrutinized the picture, remembering Mrs. Asaki’s words at their last tea. She had always assumed this doll-like creature was a romantic lost love, a parallel to her grandmother’s Shohei. But in fact she had been second choice…just as her husband was now.
Sarah’s uncle lived almost two hours away in Osaka. He was the same age as Mrs. Nishimura, and he was a